Chapter 207
The jetty, wet and cold. Aldhrun standing dead at his wall, shield to the stone, Lärka sitting at his feet. And out on the falling white, far out, the small kneeling shape of Ysel, fraying, getting further away as the tide pulls back.
at the jetty's end, already knotting a rope round his own waist.
looking down at the small grey-bearded man with the rope round his waist. Then, slowly, he takes the rope's end out of Drekk's hands and ties it round himself.
turning his drowned face toward the white, toward the kneeling girl.
Drämmen wading in: down off the wet jetty stones, into the falling white, deeper, deeper, his huge outline going dotted, then sketched, then faint grey line, the rope paying out behind him across the blank.
on the jetty, held by a line of hands: Drekk first, then Smurjan (three shadow-hands on it too), Vigolas, Kompis, Rougeina, Isa, Trollmage, Bastion guards, Lärka, all of them standing in one long puddle Bror has flooded across the stones.
The rope, taut across the white. The crew holding it. The sun climbing. One hour. Two. The rope jerking.
eyes gold, following the rope's thread out into the white, where threads shouldn't be. Faint, at its far end, Drämmen's sea-green knot. And beside it, thinner than a hair, Ysel's one thread, the one to Drekk, still there.
No SFX. Grey figures rising out of the white on either side of the rope: the Unwritten, coming back, wading toward the place where Drämmen is, reaching for the rope.
The crew defending a rope: Rougeina Swapping out along it to cut emerald lights; Kompis firing all five guns over the white; Bror shoving fjord water out across the blank in great sheets to make puddles along the rope's length, islands of counted ground for the crew to leap between; Mingus running out along the rope across the white, the grey parting at his paws, growling the Unwritten back from it.
at the jetty's end, the only one who can't join the fight and keep the rope, planting her bare feet in the puddle, holding the line in both hands, and holding the moment, …ba—, so that every Unwritten in her sight reaching for the rope stops, at least the parts of them that are still counted. Their hands, frozen, an inch from the line.
jerking hard in the crew's hands. Then pulling back, steady, hand over hand, as something huge out in the white starts climbing toward them.
rising out of the white, and the heartbeat SFX counting up from nothing:
And in his arms, held against his chest like a drowned child: Ysel.
Drämmen wading up out of the white onto Bror's flooded puddle at the jetty's foot and collapsing to his knees, more water than ever pouring from him, his face sagging further, less of him. He lays Ysel down in the puddle.
lying in the shallow puddle. Half of her is not there. Where the grey half of her face was, there's a dotted outline, faint grey lines sketching a cheek, an ear, half a mouth. Her pale eye open and wet and looking at nothing. Her chest barely moving. No shadow at all.
on his knees in the puddle, taking her pale hand.
(Her pale eye finds him. Her lips move. No sound.)
swaying on his knees, water pouring.
splashing into the puddle and kneeling, lifting Ysel's head into her lap. She takes the folded scrap of sail-canvas from inside her shirt, the one she wrote all night, and holds it tight in her fist without opening it. She doesn't need to.
eyes closing. Not unfolding Värn. Not the Remembered Beat. Something new. She bends over the half-girl in her lap and starts to remember her, out loud, steadily, the way she reads the names on her arm every morning.
At the edge of the dotted line, one stroke of real line drawing itself in: the curve of an ear.
going on, her voice steady, her arms tightening round the girl.
filling in: a cheekbone. Half an eyebrow. The corner of a mouth. Line by line.
On a flooded jetty in the dawn light, at the foot of a wall of light where a dead old soldier stands guard: a farm girl kneeling in a puddle with a half-erased girl's head in her lap, eyes closed, speaking. And the half-girl's face filling back in: the dotted grey half drawing itself whole, line by line, stroke by stroke, a cheek, an ear, a brow, the other half of a mouth, the other eye, colour flowing into it from the farm girl's hands like dye into cloth.
Around them, the whole crew on their knees in the water, silent. Drekk holding the girl's hand with both of his. Drämmen slumped, dripping, watching. Mingus lying with his chin on the girl's ankle.
opening her eyes, swaying, pale. And her face goes blank for a moment, searching.
(The price: her own childhood, a little more of it.)
kneeling beside her, taking her hand, a beat late.
whole: a young woman, pale, solemn, two dark grey eyes, short dark hair. Both halves the same. No grey. No dotted line. She's breathing.
eyes gold, and round Ysel there are threads, the first time they've held: not one any more, but several, faint and new, to Drekk, to Öde, to Mingus, to the crew. Counted.
moving. Not words yet. Humming. Very softly. Five notes up, three down. And then, for the first time, the rest of it: four more notes, coming down home, finishing the tune.
hearing it, his whole face breaking.
in the dawn light. The sun is behind her. Everyone kneeling in the water casts a shadow across it: Öde, Drekk, Mingus. Ysel casts none.
opening both eyes, whole, and looking up past Öde's face to the grey-bearded man holding her hand.
her voice small and dry and clear, with the faintest crooked edge of a smile that nobody on the Kettle ever saw.